As GPU families reach the later part of their lifecycles, chip manufacturers often begin to offload stockpiles of salvaged chips. These chips, which didn’t make the cut for their intended tier of cards, hold economic value despite being unremarkable. Consequently, they are repurposed in lower-tier cards. Judging by a newly surfaced video card design from MSI, it appears NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace generation has entered this stage. MSI has introduced a new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super card utilizing a salvaged AD102 GPU.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super series typically utilizes the AD103 GPU. Positioned below the flagship RTX 4080/4090 cards, which are based on the superior AD102 chip, the RTX 4070 Ti series makes use of AD102 chips that fall short of RTX 4080 standards. Rather than discard these chips, they are used to manufacture RTX 4070 cards, as MSI has done with their new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Black OC graphics card.
This card is fairly unremarkable in terms of performance; using a binned AD102 chip doesn’t provide any performance advantage, thus it performs akin to regular AD103 cards. Video card vendors seldom highlight the use of binned-down chips, but the typical PCB footprint of larger chips often gives it away. This trend was observed by @wxnod, and has been confirmed with MSI’s card.
Ada Lovelace Lineup: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 TiS (AD103), RTX 4070 TiS (AD102), & RTX 4090 (AD102)
The telltale sign is the rear board shot provided by MSI. The AD102 GPU has a larger mounting bracket and a more complex array of filtering capacitors on the PCB’s back side. These features are visible in MSI’s photos of their GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Black OC, allowing clear comparison to other cards. It reveals the same capacitor layout as MSI’s GeForce RTX 4090, confirming the use of an AD102 GPU.
Ignoring chip curiosities, all NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics cards, whether based on AD102 or AD103, feature GPUs with 8,448 active CUDA cores and 16 GB of GDDR6X memory. Therefore, the specific chip used usually doesn’t matter. Compared to a fully-enabled AD102 chip, the RTX 4070 Ti Super is modestly spec’d, with significantly fewer CUDA cores, indicating a heavy salvage bin usage for the AD102 chip in MSI’s card.
The rest of the MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X Black OC is hefty, with a corresponding cooling system. This overclocked model has a slightly higher TDP, clocking in at 295 Watts, 10 Watts above the baseline for RTX 4070 Ti Super cards.
Other manufacturers are also using salvaged AD102 chips for GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super cards. @wxnod shared a screenshot revealing an Inno3D GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super based on an AD102 GPU.
